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The First Nations, Métis, Inuit Indigenous Ontology and Challenges in the Development of an Indigenous Community Vocabulary in the Canadian Context

2025· article· en· W4413044265 on OpenAlex
Stacy Allison‐Cassin, Camille Callison, Robin Desmeules

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Information and Library Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicIndigenous Studies and Ecology
Canadian institutionsMcGill UniversityUniversity of the Fraser ValleyDalhousie University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIndigenousTerminologyContext (archaeology)OntologyControlled vocabularyVocabularyTraditional knowledgeWork (physics)Library sciencePolitical scienceComputer scienceWorld Wide WebGeographyLinguisticsEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Creating and implementing Indigenous-led thesauri and vocabularies for wide adoption by cultural memory institutions is essential to providing respectful terminology to describe materials by and about Indigenous peoples in the territory referred to as Canada. This article details the background, creation, and reflections on the First Nation, Métis, and Inuit, Indigenous Ontology (FNMIIO), up to the release of the first draft in June 2019 as well as more recent initiatives and transformations. Grounded in the recommendations developed by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations’ (CFLA) Truth and Reconciliation Committee, the article discusses the creation of the FNMIIO as an important first step in addressing the need for a widely adoptable, Indigenous run and led thesaurus for use in cultural memory institutions. The article discusses both the methods undertaken in the project and the challenges faced in the development of the FNMIIO and connects the challenges to issues in libraries and the cultural heritage sector in the territory known as Canada as a whole. While a crucial proof-of-concept, the FNMIIO exposed several important issues that must be addressed to fully develop the thesaurus, particularly with respect to ensuring the longevity of the project. While much work remains to make the FNMIIO fully usable by institutions, the initial lessons learned by the CFLA Indigenous Matters Committee’s Joint Working Group as they progressed through the gathering of community names will undergird the next steps for the development and deployment of the FNMIIO.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.667
Threshold uncertainty score0.988

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0130.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.038
GPT teacher head0.305
Teacher spread0.267 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it